Among other points, Christopher Graham was critical of David
Cameron’s “grudging”
stance on Freedom of Information, partly in response to the Prime Minister’s
recent remarks describing FOI as something that “furs up the arteries of
government.”

In contrast, Lord O’Donnell, a familiar opponent of the
existing legislation, explained to the committee that:

“The problem is the multiciplicy of grey areas… we need some
principles. At the moment, the great cost from FOI is uncertainty. Nobody knows
whether a piece of paper, when it is written down, is going to be public or
not. There is going to be some panel of people - who may never have worked
closely with ministers or in central government - who are going to make this decision.
That’s what worries me, the uncertainty, if we add clarity, get rid of the grey
areas, this is either exempt or it’s not, you can decide where you want to put
the line.”

The Guardian has compiled a
list of 366 FOI requests (one for each day of the year!) and what they tell
us to highlight how FOI is used by the public. Also featured in the same newspaper this month was an editorial highlighting
the importance of protecting Freedom of Information legislation: “… in the seven years since it came into force, the act has shed light on data
the authorities did not choose to reveal. FOI enabled the Guardian to uncover
details of the wildly varying death rates after vascular surgery, and the
number of Afghan civilians killed by British forces in Afghanistan. The
tribunal affirmed its importance in facilitating investigative journalism. At a
time when serious, well-sourced reporting is at a premium, undermining FOI
would be a retrograde step.”

Michael Gove appeals ICO decision

Education Secretary Michael Gove is taking the ICO to a tribunal to
challenge a ruling that he must release data from emails sent using his wife’s
email account. The ICO has stated that the information should be released as
involves “the business of the public authority”, where as Mr Gove maintains
that it was a “political discussion”, and not covered by the Act as he had sent
it through a private account. Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for
Freedom of Information, said
that: “If all you have to do to avoid FoI is switch to Hotmail or claim
that the document has any link to ‘politics’, the [FOI 2000] act would be a
hollowed-out shell.”

Central government FOI response times have improved

According
to the ICO, the Ministry of Defence and the Cabinet Office have improved
their response times to freedom of information requests, however six other
authorities, including the Welsh government, have been “required to sign
undertakings committing them to speeding up the time it takes to respond to
requests.”

MoJ Research and the cost of FOI

Ipsos Mori have published
research on behalf of the Ministry of Justice into Freedom of
Information. They have found that the mean average cost of an FOI request is
£184, although the modal average is noticeably lower. They observed that “When
focusing on the distribution of volume and costs, it does appear that a small
minority of expensive requests account for a notable proportion of the total
costs involved.” By multiplying this average figure by the number of requests
received across central government departments, they estimate that FOI costs
the tax payer £8,456,272 per year in staff time.

For example, the Ipso Mori research describes the cost per
year, despite only drawing on two months' worth of data and acknowledging
that the volume of requests has been steadily increasing in recent years.
Perhaps more problematic is the assumption that all 21 central government
departments operate in the same way; during the course of our research, we
found that different public authorities vary greatly in the time they take to
perform tasks and processed associated with FOI, something that the ICO
has also evidenced with specific reference to central government.

Bush, Blair, and Thatcher

The ICO has ordered the FCO to release
redacted transcripts of conversations between George Bush and Tony Blair from
March 2003. The FCO is appealing the decision.

Martin
Rosenbaum has reported on how recently disclosed Cabinet Officer papers
reveal how Margaret Thatcher’s government was misinformed about the causes of
the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. The Information Commissioner
ordered the disclosure of the documents last year and were initially the
subject to an FOI request by the BBC; The government has since agreed to
publish the material via an independent panel later this year.

FOI around the world

Australia

Scrutiny of the cost of FOI is not limited to the UK. In Australia, Information
Commissioner John McMillan has recommended
doubling some freedom of information processing charges and applying new fees
to requests.

Freedominfo.org has written a good
overview of the draft FOI law proposed this month. Spain is the only large
country in the European Union without any existing freedom of information
legislation.

In a separate development, further to proposed changes to EU
privacy law outlined earlier this year and the controversial “Right To Be
Forgotten (RTBF)” agenda, Spain’s highest court has asked the European Court of
Justice whether or not European citizens can lawfully ask
Google to delete data from their search engine.